I did not see a room full of educators wringing their hands about what the federal government is doing to them. I did not see institutional leaders performing gratitude for scraps of philanthropic attention. I did not see the particular kind of exhausted, defensive posture that Black institutions in America have been pressured to adopt for as long as they have existed — the posture that says: please don't cut us, please don't close us, please remember that we matter.
What I saw instead, inside the gleaming new science center at Johnson C. Smith University, was something that the people currently dismantling federal support for HBCUs clearly did not anticipate when they drew up their plans—a room full of advocates who have decided that the compass points forward, and who are moving accordingly.
The occasion was the Higher Education Leadership Foundation's inaugural "A Futurist Symposium: Mapping the Future for the HBCU" — a two-day convening that brought together HBCU presidents, philanthropic partners, corporate leaders, and scholars on the JCSU campus. H.E.L.F. has spent a decade building the pipeline of HBCU leadership and this symposium was its argument about what comes next.
And the argument was not a modest one.
That matters because the story being told about HBCUs in Washington right now — in budget proposals, in executive orders, in the casual indifference of policymakers who have decided that institutions built for Black Americans are expendable inconveniences — is a lie. And I am tired of watching that lie go unanswered.
Adam Harris, the author of The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal — And How to Set Them Right, documented with precision what most people in power prefer to treat as ancient, settled history. That from the Morrill Acts forward, the American state made deliberate, documented decisions to underfund Black institutions while funneling resources to predominantly white ones. Harris was not writing about attitudes or atmospheres. He was writing about money — who got it, who didn’t, and why. His argument was that the underfunding of HBCUs is not a market failure or a management problem. It is a policy choice, compounded across generations, that has never been fully reckoned with or repaired.
